At the Guardian, Krithika Varagur interviewed workers inside the Indonesian factory that manufactures clothing for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, finding poverty wages, anti-union intimidation and unreasonably high production targets. The story includes interviews with more than a dozen workers, who asked that details about their identities be changed to avoid being fired. Varagur writes:

Alia is nothing if not industrious. She has worked in factories on and off since leaving her provincial high school, through the birth of two children, leading up to her current job making clothes for brands including Ivanka Trump at the PT Buma Apparel Industry factory in Subang, West Java.
Throughout her marriage to her husband, Ahmad, one or both of them has always worked. And yet, says Alia, the couple can never think about clearing their debts. Instead, what she has to show for years of work at PT Buma is two rooms in a dusty boarding house, rented for $30 a month and decorated with dozens of photos of their children because the couple can’t dream of having enough money to have them at home. The children live, instead, with their grandmother, hours away by motorcycle, and see their parents just one weekend a month, when they can afford the gasoline.
Alia makes the legal minimum wage for her job in her province: 2.3 million rupiah, or about $173 a month – but that legal minimum is among the lowest in Indonesia as a whole, and as much as 40% lower than in Chinese factories, another labour source for the Ivanka Trump brand.
PT Buma, a Korean-owned garment company started in Indonesia in 1999, is one of the suppliers of G-III Apparel Group, the wholesale manufacturer for prominent fashion brands including Trump’s clothing.
Many Buma workers know who Ivanka Trump is. Alia noticed her labels popping up on the clothes about a year ago.

Read the full story at the Guardian.
In other news:
_Denver Post_: Ethan Millman reports that Colorado’s newly adopted Uninsured Employer Act will creates a fund for injured workers whose employers lack insurance. Under the law, the state will still be able to fine employers who don’t have proper workers’ comp insurance, however the fines will now go toward injured employees. A spokesman for the state’s department of labor said: “Essentially in the past, if a worker was to be injured, the worker was left in a very precarious position. If an employer didn’t have insurance, a number of problems would come up for the employee. Unpaid medical bills and other complications arose. With the signing of this bill, employees can get what is needed even if the employer doesn’t have it.”
BuzzFeed News: Cora Lewis reports that the Trump administration is withdrawing Obama-era labor guidance that defined parent companies as “joint employers” alongside their franchisees, making them liable for unfair working conditions at franchise locations. Also being withdrawn is guidance that said gig economy workers should be considered employees of the corporations they work for, as opposed to independent contractors. Lewis reports: “While there are few immediate consequences of the change, it will almost certainly affect the outcome of cases now before the National Labor Relations Board, which concern whether parent companies like McDonald's are responsible for labor conditions at franchise locations, and what rights and benefits companies like Uber owe their drivers.”
Huffington Post: Emily Peck reports that Walmart’s sick leave policy is especially difficult for women, who typically serve as the main caregivers for their families. Walmart workers accrue points every time they have to miss a scheduled shift — accrue a certain number of points and a worker can be fired. A company spokesman said points aren’t mandatory if an employee has a good reason for missing work, but a new report from the legal advocacy group A Better Balance found that the giant retailer “regularly punishes people for taking time off because of a disability or serious illness.” According to the Better Balance report, Walmart has a policy of not keeping or even looking at a worker’s doctor’s note. Peck reports: “Employees say the system effectively scares them from taking sick time and adds stress to already stressful situations. Women, who are often responsible for children at home, are in a particularly tight spot. You can’t always plan in advance for when your child gets an ear infection or needs to be picked up early from school.”
CNBC: Ester Bloom reports that no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a two-bedroom apartment in any state. Reporting on research from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Bloom reported that workers in a number of states would have to make between $20 and $35 an hour to afford such housing. In fact, an American worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 would have to work more than 94 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom rental. At the same time, federal housing assistance funds have been declining. Bloom writes: “Some business owners argue that raising the minimum wage will lead to higher prices for consumers, and some economists argue that it could depress job growth or even end up eliminating positions as it leads to more automation. A comprehensive 2016 study from the National Employment Law Project, however, found that the economists' fears aren't justified.”
_Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years. Follow me on Twitter — @kkrisberg._

HACHETTE LIVRE’S COMMITMENT TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Richard Garneau Produits forestiers Résolu
Vanves, June 8h, 2017
Dear Mr Garneau,
My company, Hachette Livre, is a customer of Resolute, and has been for many years. Our US subsidiary, Hachette Book Group, buys substantial quantities of FSC-certified ground wood paper from your Canadian mills.
We enjoy a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship. As you probably know, Hachette Book Group, as its parent company Hachette Livre, has very high environmental standards that both companies advertise in their corporate brochures and web sites. We have a history of working productively with various environmental NGOs such as Rainforest Action Network, for instance.
Greenpeace has recently attracted our attention to the conflict between it and Resolute that has erupted into a significant legal battle.
I have no intention of getting involved in the dispute, for as publishers, we have neither the expertise nor the resources to forge an educated opinion as to who is right and who is wrong in what seems to be a complex set of highly technical issues.
I would simply like to respectfully make two points.
The first is that our commitment to FSC is the cornerstone of our Social and Environmental Responsibility policy.
As such, it cannot suffer exceptions to suit a particular situation or a specific vendor. I therefore urge you to do everything in your power to retain the FSC certifications you have in Canada and more specifically, those that are necessary to meet our environmental requirements. It is of vital importance to us.
The other point I would like to make, not as a customer but as a publisher and a citizen, is that the vigor of your legal response to Greenpeace under RICO statutes strikes me as excessive. It is a very disturbing turn of events for publishers like us, who cherish public debate as an essential dimension of our activity and include many conservationists and environmentalists in our list of authors. Indeed, an escalation of the legal dispute could cause some authors to decline having their books printed on Resolute’s paper, further complicating the situation.
Needless to say, we cherish just as much the rule of law and respect the right to seek legal remedy, but I wonder whether there might not be other ways to respond to Greenpeace’s claims.
Let me put it this way: At a time when the United States has decided to turn its back on climate change by reneging on its commitment to the Paris Accord, we believe we need more than ever independent NGOs such as Greenpeace. Without them, who will speak up for the environment in the future?
I hope these suggestions will give you pause, if not meet with your approval.
This letter will be posted on our company web site after you have received it.
Thank you for your attention, and I hope you are able to resolve this dispute soon.
Sincerely,
Arnaud Nourry

I do want to go back to this sentence:

I have no intention of getting involved in the dispute, for as publishers, we have neither the expertise nor the resources to forge an educated opinion as to who is right and who is wrong in what seems to be a complex set of highly technical issues.

That is utter bullshit, embarrassingly stupid, and I have no idea why they would say this. I want to know how much this guy pays for his milk. But otherwise, it is a good letter.

No, this is not about that.
I believe it is true that for decades, shooters and politically violent people (two overlapping categories) in the US were right wingers, almost always. Case in point: the white supremacists who have now all been handed (a little bit of) jail time for emptying a pistol into a crowd of protesters at a #BLM rally outside a police station in Minneapolis (and yes, they were white supremacists).
I've also always believed that one of the reasons the right wing has the privileged luxury of hating any kind of sensible gun law and regulation reform is because they know this. They know that they are the ones with the guns, and the libtards are unarmed.
I have no opinion on what happened today in Alexandria, Virginia, where someone opened fire on a group of Republican members of Congress playing softball. I don't know if this was personal, political, or just "well, he was mentally ill" (I'll leave it to the anti-ableist language mavens to rewrite that sentence and take it out of quotation marks).
But, now, suddenly, things are a little different, no matter what happened in Alexandria.
Killers with guns intent on mass slaughter are no longer just killing elementary school children. They are also killing Republicans in Congress! Yay! Maybe now Republicans in Congress will realize how the rest of us are feeling, and do something about it!
Sorry the guy got shot, though. At least he will make a rapid recovery, according to a Tweet by Fearfull Leader. The ideal scenario would have been if the shooter was a really bad shot and only hit inanimate objects.
A letter from the organization "States United To Prevent Gun Violence":

States United to Prevent Gun Violence and our 32 state affiliates are deeply saddened that our elected officials, their staff and Capitol Police detail experienced the horrific mass shooting this morning - joining the unfortunate class of 33,000 Americans who die and 81,000 Americans injured by gun violence every year. This shooting targeting our respected elected officials is a resounding reminder that even a setting filled with the most highly trained and alert “good guys with guns” is no match the lethal and overwhelming firepower of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in the hands of a mass shooter - the same weapons of war used in 28 mass shootings since the massacre of 26 children and school teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School 4 years ago.
It is unacceptable that law enforcement are forced to confront weapons of war in the hand of civilians in their line of duty. It is worrisome that Congress is, today, considering passing a bill that will deregulate silencers - the very instruments that hinder police from identifying locations of shooters - a federal regulation that was designed to prevent ambushing of police. Our Congress needs to stand up to the gun lobby once and for all and ban sales of weapons of war to civilians and say no to deregulating silencers.
Sincerely,
Julia Wyman

"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer." -Dave Barry

When we break out the big guns -- space telescopes like Hubble or James Webb -- we can see the Universe as it was billions of years ago, if we look for long enough. From the first moment that the Universe forms stars and galaxies, so long as that light has a path to our eyes, humanity can view it with the right equipment. This record-breaking approach has brought us in contact with galaxies from as early as when the Universe was just 400 million years old: 3% of its current age.

Only because this distant galaxy, GN-z11, is located in a region where the intergalactic medium is mostly reionized, can Hubble reveal it to us at the present time. James Webb will go much farther, but SKA will image the hydrogen that's invisible to all other optical and infrared observatories. Image credit: NASA, ESA, & A. Feild (STScI).

Yet no matter how far back we go, we’ll never be able to see the era from before there were stars or galaxies at all using this approach. But a new, ambitious project just might. The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), set to begin construction next year, will map out the invisible hydrogen in the Universe, including during the epochs in where there are no stars at all.

A single dish that's currently part of the MeerKAT array will be incorporated into the Square Kilometer Array, along with around 4,000 other equivalent dishes. Image credit: SKA Africa Technical Newsletter, 1 (2016).

_[This post is dedicated to Doug Larkin. Doug was the co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. He suffered in recent years with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and passed away yesterday.] _
Dallas-based OxyChem imports about 300,000 pounds of asbestos each year. Yes, asbestos. The deadly mineral that most Americans think is banned (_it's not_) and responsible for about 15,000 U.S. cancer deaths annually.
OxyChem is likely the largest asbestos importer in the U.S. The company is required under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to report its asbestos imports to the EPA. A group of health advocates assert that the firm failed to do so. The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO); Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families (SCHF); and Environmental Health Strategy Center are using TSCA's “citizen enforcement” provision (15 USC 53 §2619) to alert OxyChem of their “notice of intent to file suit” because of company’s failure to report their asbestos imports.
OxyChem uses asbestos in its outdated chloralkali technology to produce chlorine. Plants in Europe, however, have moved to more advanced and safer technology which doesn't rely on the deadly carcinogen. Of the 31 countries of the European Union and European Free Trade Association, only one chloralkali plant out of 75 is still using asbestos in their chlorine production process.
The health groups relied on commercially-available U.S. Customs and Border Protection records to identify OxyChem’s asbestos imports. The records revealed imports totally nearly 900,000 pounds during 2013 through the end of 2015. Most of the shipments--more than 20 in total--come from the one remaining asbestos mine in Brazil. The import data, however, does not match up with records required by EPA. The health groups found this out by filing a FOIA request with EPA to determine whether OxyChem complied with EPA’s Chemical Data Reporting (40 CFR, Part 711.) It requires firms to report every four years their use of certain "significant" chemicals. Asbestos is one of those "significant" chemicals and users are required to report quantities that exceed 2,500 pounds per facility per year. OxyChem's use of asbestos over the last four years should have been reported to EPA by October 31, 2016.
The American Chemistry Council (ACC) recently submitted comments to EPA on documents the agency is preparing pursuant to the 2016 amends to TSCA. In their comments, ACC insists that asbestos can be used safely. That EPA should believe ACC's assertions that chloralkali plants, such as OxyChem's, are pristine, error-free operations in which asbestos never touches human hands or enters the air or surrounding environment. ACC also conveniently ignores the life cycle of the toxic, from the asbestos exposure that occurs in the Brazilian mining town of Minacu, the processing and shipping, to the handling, use and disposal of asbestos somewhere in the U.S.
I tip my hat to Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families (SCHF), the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO), and Environmental Health Strategy Center for using TSCA's "citizen enforcement" provision. OxyChem and EPA have until the end of July to respond to the health groups' notice of intent to sue. If EPA fails to take action to compel OxyChem to comply with the TSCA reporting provision, the health groups could file a lawsuit in a U.S. district court.

Last year’s emergency Zika funding is about to run out and there’s no new money in the pipeline. It’s emblematic of the kind of short-term, reactive policymaking that public health officials have been warning us about for years. Now, as we head into summer, public health again faces a dangerous, highly complex threat along with an enormous funding gap.
“The Zika threat will get worse,” said Claude Jacob, chief public health officer at the Cambridge Public Health Department in Massachusetts and president of the National Association of County & City Health Officials (NACCHO). “And the consequences for women and their babies are very serious.”
Jacob spoke during a May 31 press briefing on the 2017 Zika threat organized by NACCHO, March of Dimes, and the Big Cities Health Coalition (a forum for the nation’s largest metropolitan health departments). Speakers discussed the state of the Zika outbreak — there are now nearly 5,300 Zika cases reported in the U.S., including more than 1,800 pregnant women — as well as evolving research on the virus’ health effects. But the overarching message was clear: keeping the Zika virus at relative bay will require continued and sustained investment. Gaps in funding, they said, will have an especially acute impact at the community level, where local public health agencies serve as a frontline defense against the mosquito-borne virus.
“Local health departments need that sustained investment — they can’t wait for Congress to take months to act,” said Oscar Alleyne, senior advisor for public health programs at NACCHO, referring to Congress’ months-long delay in authorizing the 2016 Zika funding. “We can’t wait until there’s a fire to want to go out and buy a fire truck.”
Last year, after months of political games, Congress approved $1.1 billion in emergency Zika funding (the Obama administration had originally requested $1.9 billion on the recommendations of scientists and public health officials). That emergency money runs out this summer. At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention faces a Trump budget that proposes cutting the agency’s fiscal year 2018 budget by $1.2 billion, including a proposed cut of $136 million to public health preparedness and response. More than half of local health departments depend solely on federal funds to support their emergency preparedness activities.
Zachary Thompson, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, said “any cuts to public health preparedness are unacceptable.”
During the briefing, Thompson emphasized that public health funding cuts at the federal level have a direct impact on surge capacity at the local level. In Dallas, Thompson’s agency is leading a broad range of Zika-related activities, all of which continuously learn from and build on each another to form a comprehensive local defense to Zika. Just to name a few: diagnostic testing for at-risk pregnant women; Zika case surveillance; follow up on travel-related Zika cases; organizing with mosquito control municipalities; teaching residents how to reduce mosquito breeding habitats near their homes; distributing mosquito repellent; and participating in tabletop exercises that simulate the effects of a local outbreak.
Texas is particularly vulnerable to Zika. As of June 2, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported 12 Zika cases so far in 2017 and 323 cases in 2015 and 2016, including six cases of locally acquired Zika in the southern part of the state. The state has also reported 342 cases to CDC’s Zika Pregnancy Registry. A local Zika outbreak could prove overwhelming, Thompson said, pointing to last summer’s Zika outbreak in Florida, where public health agencies were inundated with Zika testing demands.
The Zika Pregnancy Registry is also in jeopardy, said Paul Jarris, chief medical officer and senior vice president for mission impact at the March of Dimes, during the briefing. The registry, which works with state, local and tribal public health to gather data on Zika’s effects on pregnancy and newborn health, is administered via CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD) and supported with the emergency Zika funds set to run out this July. (Trump’s budget proposal also calls for cutting the NCBDDD by $35 million.)
Jarris said the registry provides critical insights into who’s most at risk for Zika, how and when Zika infection is most dangerous to developing fetuses, and what kind of clinical protocols are needed to keep women and families safe. It’s hard to overstate just how important this kind of data is to shaping effective interventions and learning all we can about this virus. Just recently, registry data contributed to new CDC findings that 5 percent of fetuses and infants born to women with Zika in 2017 in U.S. territories had Zika-related birth defects. CDC said such birth defects were reported following Zika infections during every trimester of pregnancy. (This kind of information is why robust data collection and analysis are so essential. The more doctors, and obstetricians in particular, know about Zika virus, the better they can protect and guide their patients.)
Jarris said we’re learning more about Zika virus every day, and much of that is thanks to the federal support for Zika data collection and research that’s now in jeopardy. He not only called for adequate public health funding in the face of Zika, but “that we continue to support women’s health and the women’s health safety net in this country.” He called for supporting programs like Title X, which provide low-income women with access to family planning and preventive health services, as well as supporting gains under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that require coverage of women’s health services and maternity and newborn care. (Those gains, along with access to timely prenatal care, could be reversed if Republicans succeed in gutting the ACA’s essential health benefits.)
“We need to make sure women’s health care is strengthened in this country, not weakened,” Jarris said.
White House cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program would impact Zika-affected families as well. Combined, the two programs cover nearly half of children with special health care needs, such as the developmental disabilities associated with Zika infection.
Right now, the Zika Coalition — a coalition of dozens of health and medical groups led, in part, by March of Dimes and NACCHO — is calling on Congress to increase funding for Zika-related CDC programs, including an increase of $45 million in public health preparedness funds to “sustain current Zika response efforts.”
“Zika funds are not where they should be if we are serious about protecting the lives of the people we serve in the community,” said Alleyne. “Failing to fund Zika efforts can and will be catastrophic.”
For more on the threat of Zika, visit CDC or the March of Dimes.
_Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years. Follow me on Twitter — @kkrisberg._

"Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." -Arnold Glascow

When someone makes a shot, it’s a little instinctive to want to give them the ball again to see if they’ll make another. If they make three or four in a row, you’ll really want to ride that ‘hot hand’ as far as it will go. And if your teammate has made six, seven, or eight shots in a row, you know you’re beginning to witness something very special. There’s nothing like getting hot in quite that way.

When you hear that someone made a basket, you're already biasing your probabilities of success, even if you don't realize it. Image credit: Shutterstock.

Except, for decades, statisticians have been telling us that the hot hand is nothing more than a fallacy, the way we convince ourselves that you can better predict the results of a coin flip or a roulette wheel based on prior results. This was based in solid enough numbers, but there was a flaw: by selecting for streaks in the first place, the scientists doing the analysis had restricted their choices! When you account for that restriction, it turns out that the “hot hand” is very real.

NBA Jam may have had it right after all: when you hit a streak of three or more, some NBA players are quite figuratively 'on fire' for a prolonged time. Image credit: Robert Emerson / EA Sports.

And now for something completely different: a man with a stoat through his head. Nonono, not that. Instead, a thing from the garden:
It is, or so I understand, a truffle. Or rather two. I found them while mowing the front lawn on Sunday. This was somewhat unexpected. And indeed, I might not even have found them had I set the lawnmower to "high" instead of "low". Here's the ground they came from:
That's one; the other is equally uninteresting. The ground doesn't obviously satisfy the truffle-bearing criteria. There are tree roots around, true, including hazel (no oak in the front) but there is more plum than anything else. The soil is fairly dry right now but was very wet a week or two back.
Anyway, it makes a pleasant change from the pols. I've given fragments to two friends who have French connections and therefore know what to do with such things.

"This would be like an F8 tornado sweeping across the surface. These are winds on Mars that will never be seen again unless [there is] another impact." -Peter Schultz

When you examine craters on the surfaces of worlds across the solar system, you find that there are rays emanating outward, containing a mix of ejecta from the impactor and the surface itself. But there’s a limit to how far those rays go, and that’s normally dependent on the size of the crater. In a few instances on Mars, however, those rays go much, much farther than physics would indicate.

A detailed, infrared view of a crater on Mars at night reveals these distant, outward streaks that hold onto heat better than all the surrounding areas. Scientists believe rolling tornadoes are the core explanation. Image credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/HiRISE.

This is puzzling, especially given how sparse Mars’ atmosphere is, and what a small effect it’s thought to have. But despite its low density atmosphere, Mars often exhibits weather that’s surprisingly violent, like dust devils and tornadoes faster than anything on Earth. In fact, high-powered gun range experiments on Earth show that sideways-barreling tornadoes can be produced with events like these fantastic impacts, and that could explain these unique, distant streaks.